An Unexpected Peril

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  She left me then, my aunt Vicky, the Dowager Empress of Germany. I took a breath, as deep as I could with the tight lacing of the corset, steadying myself against the washbasin.

  Before I could gather my thoughts, the door opened once more and J. J. Butterworth slipped inside. “You look like something the cat sicked up,” she told me cheerfully.

  “What an enchanting person you are,” I replied.

  She grinned, unrepentant. “Do not wait for me when you leave tonight,” she instructed.

  I blinked at her. “You mean to remain behind? At Windsor Castle?”

  She shrugged. “I have a story to chase.”

  “This was your plan in coming all along, was it not? You used us to gain entrée to the castle because they would never permit a journalist inside if they knew who you were. What now? Rifling through the queen’s wastepaper basket?”

  Her smile would have suited a cream-filled cat. “Something like that. Do not spare a thought for me, Veronica. I will have what I came for. And I promise not to involve you,” she added with an exasperated sigh. “I know you were about to ask.”

  I flapped a hand. “I do not care. Just go.”

  She left in a whirl of aprons and indignation, but I scarcely noticed. She was hardly likely to burn the place down around everyone’s ears and I almost did not care if she did. Rage simmered within me, coupled with some other, more painful emotion that threatened to flay me alive. I was in Windsor Castle, wearing a fortune in jewels, with my father a short distance away.

  The room was suddenly stifling. Gathering my skirts in my hands, I rushed out, down the tiny staircase, and past the door I had entered. I was in a different part of the castle, and I passed through rooms I had not seen. One had walls bristling with weapons of every description, pikes and swords arranged in patterns, while another sported a gallery of paintings of men who had been instrumental in Napoléon’s defeat at Waterloo. No one stopped me or stood in my way as I fled. I hastened from one vast chamber to another until I came at last to the vestibule where we had entered. The guards stood at attention as I passed, fleeing down the crimson carpeted stairs like Cinderella as the clock struck midnight.

  CHAPTER

  26

  Upon our return to the Sudbury, Stoker and I hastened to change back into our own clothing. It required the utmost ingenuity to divest myself of the jewels and hairpieces and garments without help, but I was almost frantic in my haste to rid myself of Gisela’s things. I had had enough of playing at being a princess, I decided grimly.

  As I dressed, the familiar tweed felt like armor, bracing me against an uncertain world. It was as much a part of me as my own skin, and I understood only then how much wearing Gisela’s clothes and jewels had affected me. I had not been entirely myself dressed as I had been in the trappings of royalty. Now I was Veronica Speedwell once more, and as I finished buttoning my jacket and shot my cuffs, I felt invigorated as I had not since we had begun this endeavor.

  I had related to Stoker my exchanges with Aunt Vicky and J. J. as well as the information that Yelena was a blackmailer. We did not speak of my father; some things were too near the bone for casual discussion, and I was not ready to think about the opportunity I had let pass me by. Stoker came to collect me just as I finished, having concluded his own struggles with the false moustaches.

  “I think the bloody things took off half my skin,” he complained.

  “Never mind that now,” I told him. “We will have only a little time to search. I managed Gisela’s bedchamber earlier but found nothing.”

  “I did the same for Durand’s room just now,” he said.

  “Did what for Durand’s room?” I could just make out the large form of the captain silhouetted in the doorway.

  “May I help you, Captain?” Stoker inquired politely.

  “Where are the others?” he demanded.

  “Still at Windsor,” I informed him. “Where you ought to be. The chancellor was most put out that you could not be found. Where is Yelena?”

  Durand’s eyes were limned red with the signs of unshed tears, and a small muscle jumped unsteadily at his jaw. “I do not know.”

  “She is not with you?” Stoker asked narrowly.

  “If she were, would I ever have forsaken my duty?” He was clearly aghast at the very idea of such a thing. “I stayed behind to look for her.”

  “Is that not a dereliction of duty?” I inquired.

  “I do not care,” he said, thumping his chest with one fist. “What does it matter if my heart is gone from me?”

  I sighed. Durand was clearly as big a romantic as Stoker. “You read poetry, don’t you?” I asked.

  He blinked at me. “Yes. I write it also.”

  “Of course you do,” I murmured.

  Stoker shot me a villainous look. “Veronica, contain your worse impulses. The captain is clearly distraught.”

  Durand blinked. “What is this word?”

  “‘Distraught’? It means upset. Deeply upset,” Stoker told him.

  The captain nodded slowly. “Upset. Yes, this is true. My Yelena is gone.”

  His face crumpled and for one terrible moment I thought he was going to weep, and I had had quite enough of crying men for one day.

  I spoke to him in a brisk tone, calculated to stiffen his mettle. “Come now, Captain. It cannot be as bad as all that.”

  He fixed me with an imploring look. “I know you find things,” he said. “I have heard the baroness and the chancellor speak of it.”

  “We do have some experience,” I said with a modest gesture.

  “Then you will find my Yelena. Please.”

  I sighed and looked at the clock. Time was getting on and this might easily be our only opportunity to search for any clues to where the princess had gone or who had been responsible for Alice’s murder. “The baroness said she received a note and went out, quite suddenly.”

  “A note from whom?” he asked, thrusting out his chest manfully. “If it was another man, I will kill him.”

  “There is really no call for that,” I told him firmly. “It did occur to me that perhaps Yelena was summoned by the princess.”

  Something like hope kindled in his eyes. “You think so?”

  I shrugged. “It is possible. We still do not know where the princess is. It is conceivable that she had need of Yelena and sent for her with instructions not to reveal anything of the matter to anyone.”

  He thought, stroking his moustaches as he pondered. “This is possible,” he said. Then he shook his head, slowly and from side to side, like a buffalo. “But I think it is not true. Yelena would have told me.”

  I considered Yelena’s mildly extortionate activities and groped for a tactful way to raise the matter with Durand. Stoker had no such scruples. “Did you know she is a blackmailer?” he asked suddenly.

  Durand guffawed. “A blackmailer! That is a harsh word for a little harmless exchange of monies.”

  I gaped at him. “You knew?”

  “Of course I knew. My family will—what is the English phrase?—cut me up when I marry her.”

  “Cut you off,” Stoker corrected.

  “Yes, thank you,” Durand replied. “They will cut me off. I will have no monies of my own except what I earn as captain of the princess’s guard. Yelena and I like nice things,” he finished blandly.

  “So you conspire with her to extort money from people?” I asked, still aghast.

  He shrugged. “It is easy for a man in my position to see things. It is natural for me to tell them to my fiancée. But Yelena is her own woman. What she does with such knowledge is not for me to say.” He turned to Stoker. “You understand, no? You cannot control your woman either.”

  “I am not anyone’s woman but my own,” I returned hotly. Stoker slanted me an oblique look but said nothing.

  “Will you
help me find her?” Durand asked piteously.

  “Certainly,” I told him, baring my teeth in a savage parody of a grin. “I think you quite deserve one another.” More than that, I had just realized that Durand carried keys to all of the rooms. It would not be necessary to pick the lock of the lumber room, thus making up for the time we had spent listening to his romantic woes.

  Either Durand’s grasp of English was too poor to comprehend sarcasm or he did not care. He slapped his thighs. “Good! We will begin now, please.”

  “I will require your key to the lumber room,” I said, putting out my hand. “Mr. Templeton-Vane and I will begin there,” I added, omitting the fact that we had business of our own in that location.

  Stoker spoke then. “I think Yelena’s room should be searched first. If she left in anticipation of going to the princess for any length of time, she would have taken a few things with her—nightdress, money, that sort of thing.”

  “A perfect task for you, Captain,” I agreed.

  “I am not a woman,” he protested. “I will not know if lady things are missing.”

  “Lady things?” I asked, staring hard at him.

  He flushed, the most brilliant incarnadine shade, and I realized then what he was speaking of.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I muttered. “Very well. I will look through Yelena’s things. Stoker, come along, please. Captain, you can at least keep watch and make certain the others have not returned. We will rendezvous in the lumber room in a quarter of an hour.”

  I did not expect it would take long to search Yelena’s meager possessions, but I intended to be thorough. While Stoker looked on, I examined the contents of the dresser, counting six chemises and sets of petticoats as well as underdrawers, each neatly embroidered with a day of the week in a whimsical pattern with lovers’ knots and daisy chains. A full complement of menstrual rags were tied into a bundle and stowed beneath the undergarments. A small enameled watch lay on the washbasin, and her purse, fat with coins and notes, was where we had left it.

  “Nothing appears to be missing,” I said at last. “There are four dresses hanging in the wardrobe and the only things gone are those she was wearing today. Her money is here, as is her watch—” I broke off suddenly as Stoker turned from where he had been making his own inventory of the wardrobe. “What is it?”

  He thought a moment, then opened the wardrobe again. “Didn’t Yelena give the princess her cloak to wear on the night she disappeared?”

  “Yes,” I said, noting the toothbrush and tin of tooth powder resting on a washing flannel on the top of the dresser. A tin contained a cake of soap, a little worn and smelling of violets.

  Stoker pointed to the wardrobe. “She gave the princess her cloak, and yet here is a coat, long and warm, and a thick scarf tucked into the collar. Surely she would have worn it if she went out today. And look.” He reached down and lifted out a pair of stout overshoes. “Her warmest things are still here. And if she did mean to go out, she would never have neglected to wear overshoes.” He straightened, his expression grim. “Money and warm clothes still here? Yelena never left the hotel.”

  “Then where in the name of Priam’s petticoat is she?” I demanded. He replaced the shoes and we left. There was no sign of Durand as we made our way to the lumber room. To my surprise, the room was unlocked, the gasolier burning.

  “Durand must have already searched in here,” I mused as we surveyed the room.

  “Then why give us the key and not mention it?” Stoker asked in a distracted voice.

  I shrugged. “It is possible he is responsible for Yelena’s disappearance,” I said. “He is a moustachioed man,” I reminded Stoker. “Just like the fellow on the mountain when Alice died. J. J. thinks it was Douglas Norton, but what if it was Durand? He might have had a hand in Alice’s death and Yelena knew too much to be trusted.”

  “He is going to marry her,” Stoker protested.

  “All the more reason to dispose of her if she proves a liability,” I said. “She is a nasty little blackmailer.”

  “Your opinion of your sex is chilling,” Stoker said.

  I said nothing as I turned my attention to the various impedimenta of travel in the room. I detected the baroness’s meticulous hand in the orderly piles of trunks and stacks of baggage. Everything was neatly labeled and arranged according to the importance of the owner. A single carpetbag bearing Yelena’s name was perched on a shelf in the corner.

  “You are quite right. She did not leave,” I told Stoker. “Not without her bag.”

  I went and opened it, expecting to find the usual odds and ends that accumulate during travel. Instead, I reared back in horror as I saw the face of a man staring up at me.

  “What is it?” Stoker hurried to my side as I reached into the bag with nerveless fingers. “What in the name of the seven devils is that?”

  I lifted out what was—mercifully—not a face, but a canvas mask, fully painted with features, including a pair of dark moustaches. “It is a climbing mask,” I told him in some relief. “I read about them in Alice’s notes. Some alpinists wear them to protect the skin from the sun at altitude.” I turned it over in my hands.

  “Yelena is no climber,” Stoker pointed out. “So what is she doing with that thing?”

  I stared down at the monstrous thing, looking for all the world like a trophy, a visage peeled away from a defeated foe.

  And suddenly I knew.

  “Alice’s death. That mysterious moustachioed man on the slopes of the Teufelstreppe,” I began.

  I did not have to finish. “My God,” Stoker breathed. “The murderer used it to conceal his features. He must have been known—too well-known to risk anyone recognizing him.”

  “Most likely not Durand, then. This points to the duke,” I reasoned.

  “What if Gisela found this?” he asked. “Max already had a worthy motive to put Gisela out of the way to gain a throne for himself. If he murdered Alice and the princess discovered his guilt, then he would be stupid not to remove her.”

  “Or he might have done it at her behest,” I pointed out. “Without Gisela here to answer for herself, there is no way to know if she is author of a plot or its victim.”

  “And if Yelena discovered it among his things, she would recognize a tidy opportunity to blackmail him for money to keep quiet. Yet another desperate turn of the rack screw on a man already pushed to his limits.”

  He folded the mask and tucked it into his shirt for safekeeping before moving on to Max’s trunks. He poked idly through the silk linings and boot compartments. “Nothing here,” he said in a tone of marked disappointment.

  I passed to the chancellor’s boxes. Some were locked and marked with his cipher—no doubt for the storage of confidential papers and valuables, although the costliest items, the parures of the princess’s jewels, were secured in the locked strongbox in the princess’s bedchamber. I carried on, opening the baroness’s bags. There was precious little inside them, I realized as I searched. A bit of spilt face powder, a lace shoe with a broken heel and its mate, tied together with a bit of ribbon. No doubt they were favorites and meant for the cobbler to be mended.

  I closed her boxes with a huff of annoyance. I had been so certain we would find something of note, I reflected peevishly.

  “Veronica,” Stoker said in a slightly strangled voice.

  “What is it?” I asked as I opened a hamper of tinned Alpenwalder delicacies. I pulled a face at the pickled cabbage and pungently aged cheese.

  “Come and see this,” he said.

  “I am rather busy,” I told him as I opened a box of cheese experimentally and gave it a sniff. I reared back as if I had been struck. It was utterly vile. Little wonder Julien d’Orlande did not like it in his kitchens.

  “Veronica, now,” Stoker ordered.

  I turned, prepared to give him a piece of my mind for h
is peremptory tone when I saw his face. It was set in a grim expression as he stared down into a trunk marked BOOKS. I went to him, but I knew. Of course I knew. Before I looked down into the open trunk and saw her, nestled there amidst the magazines and books that had been tucked neatly around her, I smelled her—the faint, unmistakable fragrance of death.

  Yelena.

  * * *

  • • •

  Of course she is dead,” I said, striving for calm. “I mean, we knew it, did we not?”

  Stoker did not reply. With a surgeon’s practiced eye, he was surveying the body.

  “How?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Poison? There are no visible marks of a weapon. Ah,” he said, bending swiftly. He tugged aside the collar of her dress to reveal a livid line of dark violet. “Strangulation, I would guess from the bruises,” he said, bending to examine her hands. “No indication that she struggled, so whoever attacked her did it swiftly and with strength. She had no chance, poor girl.”

  I had not liked Yelena, but the thought of her, caught unawares by someone, struggling for breath, vision narrowing to a pinprick of light in the darkness and then . . . nothing. It was ghastly.

  Stoker lifted her gently, and as he did so, a length of white silk was revealed. I slid my hand under her body to pull it free. It was heavily creased, and Stoker regarded it with a practiced eye. “Possibly the murder weapon,” he said grimly. “The width fits the bruising around her throat.”

  I held the silk in my hands. It ought to have been cool from lying under Yelena’s dead body, but I fancied it was still warm, warm from strangling the life out of her.

  “I know who did this,” I told him.

  He glanced at the label on the trunk. “It is Maximilian’s case.”

  “This is the riband of St. Otthild. And Maximilian was wearing his tonight. As was the chancellor. And who would need a mask with painted moustaches to masquerade as a man?”

  He blinked at me. “But surely the baroness of all people would not—” Stoker began.